I see the wonderful Fred Phelps is at it yet again. He is everything that real christians should be. Judgemental, mean, disrespectful, and always making sure that you know god hates you. Not sin, not evil. You. You are the root of all evil, since you don’t love god as much as that nutty mother fucker.

Of course, if you do research on him, he is a disgraced lawyer, disbarred many years ago. His church has around 20 members, and they are mostly his family members. Of course, he is not a racist, just a raging homophobe. His children were all lawyers also, but most of the lawsuits and work they do is on behalf of the church their fucking nut bag father founded.

I don’t support the war in Iraq, but I have a brother in the service. If he died in the line of duty and they showed up, I don’t know what I would do. I think the IRS needs to revoke the churchs’ tax exempt status, and the FBI needs to investigate them as domestic terrorists.

I predict that as of tonight, millions of icecubes will be flushed down the toilets of America. No snow will come about, yet some toilets will be clogged after the pipes freeze from the 2.5 tons of ice some people will flush in order to get a snow day.

Personally I hate snow days. They make the semester schedule all funky, and if you are in elementary school, you just have to make the time up in the summer. I never realized this fact until my mom explained it to me when I was in 2nd grade. Ever since then I hated snow days. It is much better to go to school when its freezing outside and they can turn the heat up inside the school than to be stuck inside a blazing hot school with no AC. I realized that getting a “free” day off is fun, but the repayment later in the summer is not worth it.

If this ever catches on, I forsee a large number of “instant on” machines being built.

I would use it to build a new HTPC, since I don’t really need an instant on desktop or laptop. But this does hold promise, and with the proper development I think that the device could really shine, and someday be an option offered by the big box PC makers. Smell, DP, Getaway, they will all offer this, and as usual, they will only use it as a selling point, and then people that don’t know what it is for will buy it, and then flood tech call centers with the same question or complaint. I imagine it will sound like this: “My sales expert told me this would be a great addition to my computer, but what does it do?” or “I was told that I could put 8GB of RAM into this, and I don’t show that I have 8GB, only 256MB of RAM.”

That was one thing that really annoyed me when I was a tech support rep. People who would purchase awesome hardware, and then only get 256MB of RAM, or they would get RAID controllers and a single ATA HDD and then call in and complain about the controller card not doing anything.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 – Jack Abramoff will plead guilty to three felony counts in Washington on Wednesday as part of a settlement with federal prosecutors, ending an intense, months-long negotiation over whether the Republican lobbyist would testify against his former colleagues, people involved with the case said.

With Jack Abramoff’s cooperation, the Justice Department will have a potentially critical witness to alleged patterns of corruption within the Republican leadership.

Mr. Abramoff, 46, is pleading guilty to fraud, public corruption and tax evasion, setting the stage for prosecutors to begin using him as a cooperating witness against his former business and political colleagues. In exchange, Mr. Abramoff faces a maximum of about 10 years in prison in the Washington case.

After entering his guilty plea in United States District Court in Washington, Mr. Abramoff will also announce a plea agreement in a related Florida case, in which he was indicted last year. In that case, he is pleading guilty to fraud and conspiracy in connection with his purchase of the SunCruz casino boat line, and will face a maximum of about seven years’ prison time.

Mr. Abramoff has been talking to investigators in the corruption case for many months, said participants in the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. They said he had given investigators a full picture of what evidence he could offer against other suspects.

His participation in Washington has taken place mostly below the radar, as prosecutors made the Miami case the focus of their public work and as Mr. Abramoff and his associates claimed they were preparing to stand trial, facing up to as many as 30 years in prison.

Mr. Abramoff will enter separate pleas in both locations. But the deal reached with the Justice Department is all-encompassing, reducing the severe penalties Mr. Abramoff could have faced in either investigation, in exchange for his inside knowledge of certain lobbying work and legislative actions. One element of the deal is that any he can serve prison time in the two cases concurrently, although the sentencing will not take place until much further along in the investigation.

Details of the long-sought plea agreement were not finalized until after 9 p.m. on Monday night, following weeks of around-the-clock communications between numerous prosecutors in several Justice Department offices and lawyers for Mr. Abramoff. The deal, a so-called “global” arrangement because it encompasses separate prosecutions in Florida and Washington, comes less than a week before Mr. Abramoff was scheduled to stand trial in the Miami case.

Official Washington has been on edge for months awaiting word of Mr. Abramoff’s legal future. Once a masterful Republican lobbyist with close ties to the former House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay, he earned tens of millions of dollars representing Indian casino interests and farflung entities like the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. Through a complicated web of financial arrangements, he helped funnel donations to his lawmaker friends’ and their campaigns, and took members of Congress, mainly the Republicans in power, on lavish trips.

Now, after more than two years of investigations, prosecutors have developed a list of at least a dozen lawmakers, congressional aides and lobbyists whose work appears suspect and who are now at the core of the case. With Mr. Abramoff’s cooperation, the Justice Department will have a potentially critical witness to alleged patterns of corruption or bribery within the Republican leadership ranks, which in some cases they believe also took the form of campaign donations and free meals at Mr. Abramoff’s downtown restaurant, Signatures.

Already, prosecutors have a key witness in Michael Scanlon, once press secretary to Mr. DeLay. Mr. Scanlon reached a plea agreement last year, putting pressure on Mr. Abramoff to reach his own deal. Now that Mr. Abramoff has done the same, one person involved in the case said: “When some people hear about this, they will clamor to cut a deal of their own.”

< --Here is my take on this wonderful, wonderful news -->

Wow, now he is not quite so “tough” anymore. Not that he was really tough, he just had a large amount of pull in the most powerful ghetto in the USA. In case you are wondering, that is Washington D.C. I have been there a few times, and I can say that it is a neat place to visit. But you can feel the corruptness in the air for sure.

Of course, I hope that Tom Delay (R) Texas, goes down in flames now. If there ever was a snake in the grass that needed to have its head cut off by the lawnmower, he qualifies as one of the top candidates.

BLOOMINGTON, Illinois (AP) — Children are no safer riding in sport utility vehicles than in passenger cars, largely because the doubled risk of rollovers in SUVs cancels out the safety advantages of their greater size and weight, according to a study.

Researchers said the findings dispel the bigger-equals-safer myth that has helped fuel the growing popularity of SUVs among families. SUV registrations climbed 250 percent in the United States between 1995 and 2002.

“We’re not saying they’re worse or that they’re terrible vehicles. We’re challenging the conventional wisdom that everyone assumed they were better,” said Dr. Dennis Durbin, a pediatric emergency physician who took part in the study, published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics.

Eron Shosteck, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said he had not seen the study but cited government research released last summer that found SUVs have become less top-heavy since 2000 and made dramatic improvements in rollover resistance.

“SUVs have an exceptional safety record and are safer than or as safe as cars in the vast majority of crashes,” Shosteck said.

The study, which Durbin called the first on SUVs and child safety, was sponsored by Partners for Child Passenger Safety, a research project of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the world’s largest insurer, Bloomington-based State Farm Insurance Co.

The researchers looked at accidents involving nearly 4,000 children under age 16 between 2000 and 2003, and found child injury rates of about 1.7 percent in both cars and SUVs. The study examined only 1998 or newer cars and SUVs with second-generation air bags.

On average, the SUVs weighed 1,300 pounds more than the cars studied. The study found that the extra weight of SUVs enhanced safety, reducing the risk of injury by more than a third.

But that was offset by findings that SUVs were more than twice as likely as cars to roll over in crashes.

Children in rollovers were three times more likely to be seriously injured than those in non-rollover accidents, according to the study.

The findings surprised researchers, who assumed heavier SUVs were safer than cars when they launched the study a year ago, Durbin said.

SUV safety will probably improve because of legislation approved by Congress this year that requires the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to develop standards for automakers to address SUV rollovers, he said.

“To the extent that SUV makers can solve the rollover problem, we may see them becoming the safe haven for children that they have the potential to be,” Durbin said.

Automakers already have made strides through engineering and new technology such as electronic stability control, Shosteck said.

NHTSA spokesman Rae Tyson agreed but said he hopes the study will encourage families to check safety ratings closely before buying.

“I think there is a segment of the buying public that may be buying them with the false impression that they are buying the safest vehicle they can for their families,” Tyson said.

I think this one goes down under the “NO SHIT SHERLOCK” category.

Yes, if you happen to live in an area where there are no hills, no corners and no traffic other than smaller vehicles, then yes, an SUV is the safest choice you can make. But lets be really honest here. The safety factor from size has always been negated by people who think that the SUV is really a sport vehicle. Many times I have seen people driving an SUV like it was built to take corners like a motorcycle or sports car. I have even seen an SUV go up on two wheels going through an intersection before. Hell I drive a low sitting rear wheel drive Lincoln with a handlding package, and I don’t push through some of the corners as fast as I have seen some people in minivans and SUV’s. Of course, my tires don’t start to screech and I don’t have to slow down, until the person in front of me starts to lose control and I don’t want to be a part of their 1 person stupidity show.